It’s been a long time

 Today was the first time in maybe a year that I got a snail mail letter from a person in California. It was only last year that I went online in search of pen pals to make because I realized how lonely I was with all my real friends not being able to talk or visit with me much.

This friend, Carla, had lived all over California like me, so it was refreshing to hear from her about adventures and things I was familiar with (Like the bald eagles in Big Bear Valley - I didn’t realize that they have three eggs this season. I hope they all hatch since last year they lost a couple eggs!)

One of the things that cheers me up with snail mail is how some of my pen pals will really go all out. Carla, for instance, likes to decorate with stickers and send extra stuff like her spirographs designs and other nice things. Today her letter came with a special little card (meant for giving to kids in their lunches) and it made me so happy. The inside of the card says “You can make today, tomorrow, your whole life extraordinary.” and the outside says “DREAM BIG” - it means a lot to me since, well, everything.

By everything, I mean my life. The other day when Ian’s speech therapist was over, I told her a little bit about my life because she had thought I was from Alabama (big surprise), and I got to talking about how one of my life goals is to write my memoir, but that now it is going to have to be several memoirs - one for each part of my life - because so much has happened. I legit forgot how important that dream was for me. I had not really took the time to write my memoir in ages mostly because I didn’t even know where to start. But a couple things have happened recently that make me really think I need to work on this for real.

The one thing was that conversation with the therapist. It reminded me that my story is worth telling. 

Then just the other day I found a mother on Instagram who I was following since Ian was going through all his medical trauma, who had a special needs child much older than Ian, had just gone through the devastating process of burying her boy who would have been eight years old this month had he survived. Azaan, the special needs child of Asia, who came from a Pakistani heritage, lived in Great Britain but still incurred the negative outlooks from those of her culture in Pakistan because they frown upon any disability, seeing it as a curse. Asia was writing her own memoir over the years, mostly about Azaan and being his mother. She pursued this dream to the point that she even took a Harper Collins course on writing, something that only was made available in her country, and became a part of a writer’s group online. Asia was going through so much with her son, and I know she probably had so much more to say in her memoir than she actually got onto pages.

Before I discovered that Asia was writing her memoir, however, there was another mother out on the Instagram who I had also followed just as long as Asia. This other mom never even got to see her son come home from the hospital. She spent almost every day in the NICU or PICU and prayed fervently for her son Zen to get well. If I recall correctly, Zen was three years old when God took him home. And his mother, just like Asia, had a story to tell. She wrote her book on a different subject, however, and when she finally released it, though I was looking forward to reading it, I discovered that she didn’t so much as have an excerpt or reviews from anyone on the book. It was an e-book too, and she wanted to sell them for twenty dollars. I couldn’t just give twenty dollars for something I didn’t know I would like. Not just that, but I didn’t know if that book was 20 pages long or 2,000 pages long. So it got me to thinking hard about what would make my book or books worth reading too. 

I started writing my childhood memoir last night. Lord willing it will be close to finished for first draft stage in only a month. I don’t know why but once I got serious and realized how I had been talking about writing for years but not actually writing, it really pushed me forward.

Where did I start? At the end. Sort of. I needed a beginning that would draw my reader in, so what better place to begin than in a pivotal part of my story?